1. Field
One feature relates to providing content protection for venue-specific or event-specific broadcast services. More specifically, a service subscriber key is distributed by a venue service provider to subscriber access terminals and is also provided to the broadcast multicast network infrastructure to encrypt the content to be broadcasted.
2. Background
Mobile broadcast is a technology that enables wireless delivery of content and services to consumers, among which some of its applications include mobile television (TV), mobile advertisement, and up-to-date media distribution via clip-cast and data-cast. There is potential value and convenience to providing broadcast services to enable venue-centric content delivery to mobile subscribers within, or in the vicinity of, a particular venue. Examples include sending an electronic coupon to shoppers' devices in a mall, streaming videos that introduce amenities on a cruise ship, and/or live broadcast from different corners of a race track to mobile users in a NASCAR stadium. This type of localized, event-based or venue-based broadcast service, hereinafter referred to as venue-cast, has the potential of becoming an attractive value-added service to current subscribers of wireless services. Venue-cast transmissions or broadcasts may be done via a number of physical layer technologies including cellular (e.g., Evolution Data-Only (EVDO)) as well as terrestrial mobile TV transmission (e.g. MediaFLO by Qualcomm Inc.).
One difficulty with such venue-cast broadcast services is how to bill or restrict the venue-cast services to particular users (e.g., paid or authorized subscribers or users) in an efficient and reliable way. Therefore, a method is needed to allow securing such venue-cast services and/or billing them to the subscriber or user.